Constable was the first Britannica publisher to solicit new articles from the leading scholars and artists of his day, and among the contributors to the Supplement and the Sixth Edition, both completed in 1824, were such distinguished men of letters as William Hazlitt, Walter Scott, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus. Constable ’s Fifth Edition of 1817 was criticized as little more than a reprint of Bell ’s Fourth, but soon afterward a six-volume Supplement appeared which cemented the reputation of the Britannica as the premier encyclopedia of the English-speaking world. Constable was an able promoter and manager, and under his direction the Britannica made important advances in the quality of its writing and increased sales both in Great Britain and the United States. ”) By this time the Britannica was well known and widely sought after the Third Edition sold between 10,000 and 13,000 copies and is said to have returned the substantial profit of £42,000 to Andrew Bell, its sole proprietor after the death of Macfarquhar.īell remained the owner and manager of the Britannica until his own death in 1809, after which his heirs sold the company ’s stock and copyrights for £13,500 to Archibald Constable, an Edinburgh publisher. (Macfarquhar died in 1793 at the age of forty-eight, “worn out, ” as later publisher Archibald Constable put it, “by fatigue and anxiety of mind. It was followed by a Third Edition of eighteen volumes completed in 1797, edited by Macfarquhar and George Glieg, later a bishop and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. The Second Edition was among the first encyclopedias to include articles on history and biography, two subjects which have since become standard. James Tytler succeeded Smellie as editor of the Second Edition, which was published between 17 in ten volumes totaling 8,595 pages and 340 copperplates engraved by Bell. The new encyclopedia sold well, and its editors began immediate preparations for a second, much larger edition. The editors themselves wrote many of the shorter articles, while the longest pieces ( “Surgery ” and “Anatomy ”) were treatises of well over one hundred pages each. The Encyclopaedia contained 2,659 pages, including articles borrowed from such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin (on electricity) and John Locke (on human understanding). The two men engaged William Smellie, a twenty-eight-year-old scholar at the University of Edinburgh, as general editor of the First Edition of their proposed Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was published and sold in one hundred parts between 17. The French Encyclopedic, first published in 1751, became the symbol of French radical humanism and generated international controversy for its allegedly blasphemous philosophy, but there is no evidence that the creators of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were directly inspired by the fame of the Encyclopedic (which in fact was begun as a translation of an earlier work by the Englishman Ephraim Chambers).Īndrew Bell, a prosperous engraver of Edinburgh, and the printer Colin Macfarquhar were convinced that the English-speaking world could use a reference work featuring substantial treatises on the arts, sciences, and trades combined alphabetically with shorter entries defining important terms and concepts. The idea of uniting in a single publication all aspects of human knowledge went back at least to Roman times, but it was in the eighteenth century, the “age of enlightenment, ” that encyclopedias in the modern form began to appear in Europe.

Macfarquhar, and sold by Colin Macfarquhar at his printing office in Nicolson-street, ” as the First Edition ’s title page informed its readers.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published between 17 “by a society of gentlemen in Scotland, printed in Edinburgh for A.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., is owned in turn by the William Benton Foundation of Illinois, a charitable foundation supporting programs in journalism and the media at the University of Chicago. and Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, which markets audio-visual and electronic learning aids as well as books to schools and libraries. Today, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., markets the Britannica in more than 100 countries around the world and is also the parent company of Merriam-Webster, Inc., publishers of the famed dictionaries Compton ’s MultiMedia Publishing Group, Inc. The Britannica is respected throughout the world for its combination of breadth and thoroughness in its treatment of everything from the Punic Wars to quantum mechanics, and many of its articles, written by outstanding scholars in their respective fields, are masterpieces of compact erudition unlike anything else in the field of learning. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., has published one of the world ’s finest encyclopedias for more than two centuries.

Macropedia britannica